Yahoo launches new green data center

Your Yahoo mail and Flickr accounts just got greener. Sunnyvale-based Yahoo Inc. officially launched its first green data center this morning. Located far across the country in Niagara County, New York, the facility — which holds 50,000 servers — takes advantage of the abundant hydropower of the area and the naturally cool climate to get its green on. The data center mimics a chicken coop design to boost air flow, so that instead of roughly half its energy use going to cooling, just 1 percent does.

Yahoo!

If you’re wondering how the facility stacks up to competitor Google’s green server farms, it’s a hair more efficient, according to the PUE scale monitored by The Green Grid organization.

Our purple neighbor to the south received a Department of Energy Green IT grant of $9.9 million to build the facility, the largest award the program has ever granted. According to Yahoo, the New York data center will save enough energy to power more than 9,000 chilly New York households a year. It saves as much water per year than flows over Niagara Falls in a full minute (which, if you’ve been, you’ll now is quite a lot). And here’s the bittersweet part: It creates 125 jobs … in faraway New York State.